#1571 Anthony & John Pompliano | How Bitcoin Conquered Wall Street

Anthony Pompliano and John Pompliano discuss everything that is happening with bitcoin, why bitcoin ETFs are making more money than S&P EFTs, US dollar collapse and what that means for asset prices, why Elon Musk wants to start a new political party, and how this all affects your portfolio. ========================Core is the leading Bitcoin scaling solution, enabling you to lock in yield by locking up your Bitcoin. Simply lock it on the Bitcoin blockchain to secure the Core network, and get rewards. No bridging. No lending. Just holding. Still your keys. Still your coins. Now your yield. Start at https://stake.coredao.org/pomp========================Bitwise is one of the largest and fastest-growing crypto asset managers. As of December 31, 2021, the company managed over $1.3 billion across an expanding suite of investment solutions, which include the world's largest crypto index fund and other innovative products spanning Bitcoin, Ethereum, DeFi, and crypto equities. Whether you’re an individual, advisor, or institution, Bitwise provides intelligent access to crypto with your unique circumstances in mind. Visit www.bitwiseinvestments.com to learn more. Certain of the Bitwise investment products may be subject to the extreme risks associated with investing in crypto assets. Visit www.bitwiseinvestments.com/disclosures/ to learn more.=======================Invest as you spend with the Gemini Credit Card® (https://www.gemini.com/pomp). Sign up today and get approved by 6/30/25 to earn a $200 Bitcoin bonus. Terms apply (http://gemini.com/legal/credit-card-intro-promo-terms). The Gemini Credit Card is issued by WebBank. See rates & fees (https://www.gemini.com/legal/cardholder-agreement) for more details. Some exclusions apply to instant rewards in which rewards are deposited when the transaction posts. This content is sponsored by Gemini, but my opinions are my own.=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 0:58Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:50Anthony Pompliano?

  What's going on guys? Today we've got a great episode with John Pompliano. We talked through everything you want to know about. BlackRock's got a brand new data point out about the Bitcoin ETF and how it's making more money than the S and P 500. Talk about why fiat is broken. What's going on with the Federal Reserve? What's happening to the stock market? And also Elon Musk started a new political party. What does that mean for economics, the financial global system? And why is so much of politics becoming a distraction for investors? And how can you avoid it? We get into all of that and much more today in my latest conversation with John Pompliano. All right, John, what's the first topic?

• 2:24Speaker 03

  All right, BlackRock's ETF, their Bitcoin ETF is earning more than their S and P 500 ETF. Obviously, their Bitcoin ETF is much newer. Why? How? Who's buying this? What is going on?

• 2:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, the first thing is that Bitcoin is now assaulted Wall Street and Wall Street. This is their full undivided attention and focus is they realize that if you embrace Bitcoin, it brings you new customers, new assets and new revenue. And if there's one thing that Wall Street likes, Wall Street likes growth and Bitcoin brings growth. And so you are about to see a ton of Wall Street products rolled out with Bitcoin touching them, in them, around them, related to them, et cetera. Now, this is very interesting because it's not just about, hey, we have some growth. It's all about relative performance. And so I think that there's like $6 trillion or some crazy number in the BlackRock S and P ETF. And in that ETF, they charge like 0.03%, right?

• 3:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, if you go and you take a look at what the Bitcoin ETF is bringing, they're charging, I think it's like 20 basis points or 25 basis points. And so they just charging way more and so you can have less assets in there. Now, they don't care if they make money because of high volume on assets and a really, really low fee, or if they make it on smaller set of assets and just a higher fee. They actually would prefer to have the higher fee because guess what's going to happen? Right now, the Bitcoin ETF just eclipsed the BlackRock S and P ETF. Guess what's going to happen as more assets flow into Bitcoin and Bitcoin's price goes up? I expect actually that the Bitcoin ETF is going to be two times the amount of revenue that the S and P ETF throws for BlackRock.

• 4:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Everyone else is paying attention. All these other asset managers are like, wait a second, why aren't we doing that? That seems like a pretty good deal. And sure, maybe we don't get as many assets and maybe we can't even charge as high a fees, but it's better than zero. And so that's where you're going to see this all. So my takeaway is not so much that, yes, the Bitcoin ETF earning more is kind of like a shot heard around the world. I was like, oh, wow. But it's actually the second order effect, which is then all the other funds are now scrambling to figure out how do we play in this space?

• 4:31Speaker 03

  So it brings up two key points. I think, which is one, Wall Street seems to be chasing the fee. Would you agree with that, that, you know, if there's money to be made, they're going to go find that corner of the market and do that? And then the second thing is, is there a race to the bottom with fees for the ETFs? Right? Obviously, we saw the big launch last year with a bunch of different ETF providers being approved and starting to accept funds. Is there a race to the bottom of fees? And it's just basically as a retail investor, I want the lowest fee.

• 4:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, Wall Street's whole business, for the most part, is how do I make money and not take risk? Right? That is these large institutions. Now, there are risk takers within these firms that also are balanced by people who take zero risk. And so you end up with kind of lower degree of risk and the firm overall performs. Now, what you see is the asset management business is amazing because guess what? People put money in, they rarely take it out and they charge a fee to it. Makes sense as to why they're doing what they're doing. Now, with that said, what I also think is pretty interesting is that we are likely to see compression on fees. But the compression on fees is not necessarily from the ETF providers. Because there are people in the market with lower fees, but they don't have as many assets.

• 5:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So it's still a distribution game, not just a fee game, but it's distribution plus fee. And so, yes, there will be some kind of compression there. I actually think the bigger thing that is coming into the market is Bitcoin treasury companies in general. Because those Bitcoin treasury companies, the ones that are operated correctly, they actually are able to grow Bitcoin per share. So the way to think about, from a public market investor or somebody who's accessing the public markets and wants Bitcoin exposure. You can buy the ETF, you get direct Bitcoin exposure, right? If Bitcoin goes up 2X, you get 2X increase in price, as long as the ETF tracks Bitcoin correctly. With the Bitcoin treasury companies, take a strategy or a meta planet. What they've been able to do is grow the Bitcoin per share.

• 6:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Meaning that if you started out and let's say that you had exposure, you know, one share is 0.1 Bitcoin. Well, if they do it correctly, then eventually one share gives you exposure to 0.2 or 0.3 Bitcoin. They're growing the amount of Bitcoins, this kind of idea of Bitcoin yield. Now, I don't think that investors overall are, can be treated as Like a single group of people. I don't think they're all going to go in the ETF. I don't think they're all going to go get spot Bitcoin in self custody. I don't think they're all going to go and buy Bitcoin and hold it, you know, at a third party custodian. I don't think they're all going to go buy Bitcoin treasury companies. What we have watched over the last 10 years or so is we have drastically opened up the aperture of access. By now giving people many different ways to get access to the asset.

• 7:06Anthony Pompliano?

  The beauty of doing that is you now are able to attract more and more capital pools. You are able to introduce Bitcoin as a different tool, right? It's kind of like if I give you a hammer and you're somebody who all you do is roofing. Then you only use the hammer for roofing. You don't know what else to do. But if I take that same hammer and I now say, oh, by the way, uh, maybe you are somebody who you hang art. Well, you're going to use the hammer in a different way. As somebody else, maybe you do construction, somebody right, and you start doing, it's the same tool. But you actually don't need the hammer for roofing. You need the hammer to be able to hang the art. And so that is really what Bitcoin now is doing is it's now being able to be used by people who use it for different things.

• 7:49Anthony Pompliano?

  Some people are using it for diversification. Some people are using it for hedging. Some people are using it for asymmetric exposure. Some people are using it as a way to actually increase the sharp ratio in their portfolio. Some people are using it as like some sort of calamity or chaos insurance, right? All kinds of different ways that people are using it. It's simply a tool that exists in the market with many different ways to access it. And when you give people different options, different people, the world's a big place, right? There's trillions of dollars of assets floating around. They're going to figure out different ways to use that. And that I think is really the story of the last 10 years of Bitcoin is we have transitioned from a contrarian asset with very limited access. To now we have something that has incredible access, both really hardcore Bitcoiners in terms of, you know, on chain or self custody or whatever.

• 8:34Anthony Pompliano?

  All the way to things that frankly, aren't very aligned with many of the Bitcoin ethos in terms of Wall Street holding your Bitcoin, right? But also what we have seen is it just transitioned from that kind of contrarian, you know, type asset to now it is a mainstream adopted asset. Which means we went from contrarian to consensus.

• 8:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Mass adoption, everything that people always wanted, like it is here. We are watching it play out. And what's pretty cool is like, they're gonna write history books about this, like the rise of Bitcoin is going to be well documented in history. And we all are fortunate enough to live through this time.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  When you think about it through an investor's lens here, there's so many different products now, right? You can do the Bitcoin treasury companies, you can do the ETFs, you can go buy it yourself, cold storage, right? Obviously, the main thing with Bitcoin has been not your keys, not your coin. How do you think about investors lens of which product to get attracted to? And I assume that means based on what their goals and what their current situation.

• 9:28Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the question always. What are you optimizing for? Right? You know, I like to rail on the financial advisors sometimes just because they can't really fight back, right? But but there's some very good ones out there, right? And if you go and you talk to them, you say, hey, how do you talk to your clients? Right? Like, teach me. I'm not a financial advisor. I don't know how this works. One of the things that you'll learn is part of the difficulty of their job is actually understanding, who am I talking to? What are their goals? What is their risk appetite? And what are they trying to actually avoid? So for example, there are certain clients that may talk to a financial advisor. Let's say that somebody is older. They're much more worried about cash management, about yield, about being able to actually use their investment portfolio

• 10:09Anthony Pompliano?

  to live on. That's very different than a 25 year old who's like, just, you know, make it long, let's just make as much money as we possibly can in my portfolio, right? Very different risk appetites, very different liquidity profiles, and also very different volatility appetites. And so I think that's the type of stuff that, you know, really is hard to answer. And so as an investor, you guys are like, what am I optimizing for? And then another input that people usually forget is like, what else do I own? And so what you're starting to see now is there is more coverage of people who are showing up that are saying, look, I own other assets. How does Bitcoin fit into that portfolio? Historically, whether people want to admit it or not, most people who bought Bitcoin who were early adopters, they kind of like the mind virus got to them,

• 10:54Anthony Pompliano?

  it infected their brain, and they all had way more Bitcoin exposure than anyone wanted to admit publicly, right? I remember getting clowned on national television when I told Kevin O'Leary More than 50% and frankly, I had way more than 50%, but I just felt like 50% was like somewhat of a more conservative number to tell him so he wouldn't freak out further, right? Um, but that was really a lot of the early adopters. Many of my friends, like it was pretty much like, once they found Bitcoin, they understood Bitcoin, they allocated immense percentages, percentages that would make a traditional financial advisor cringe. Now you're starting to get a lot of people coming in and there's still some of those people who do that stuff that are kind of net new, whatever. They tend to be younger people or whatever. But most people, they're showing up and they're saying, well, maybe I should actually have a

• 11:37Anthony Pompliano?

  percentage, 3%, 5%, something like that. I'm not going to go all in, you know, 50% or anything like that, but I also don't want to put, you know, a hundred bucks in, but it needs to be a material to my portfolio. Speaking of, um, you know, one of the developments that happened over the last two weeks, I thought was really meaningful. I wrote about it, but I don't think it's still got enough attention is Rick Edelman. Rick Edelman is in the Hall of Fame of financial advisors. That's a real thing. Uh, incredible. He's had an epic run. Um, he came out and for the first time, I believe, uh, in his career, he has now made a quote, quote, recommendation, he, his recommendation, not mine, his, uh, of what are the percentages that somebody should allocate to

• 12:18Anthony Pompliano?

  uh, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies? If I remember correctly, the lowest percentage was like 10%. I didn't really pay attention to the low percentage, but I know the high percentage was 40%. And so you, this is somebody who, he's not like a Luddite Bitcoiner. He's not, you know, somebody who's like cheering on the demise of the dollar or, you know, doing anything that people would say is kind of like off putting or quote, quote, like extreme. He's somebody who has been very well respected for a long time at looking at new technologies, understanding portfolio construction, understanding risk management, building a firm, managing the relationship as a financial advisor, like all the things that really kind of go back to like professionalism

• 13:00Anthony Pompliano?

  and risk management. And he's now saying for the most aggressive people, 40, 40, 4-0% of their allocation to Bitcoin and crypto. And that's just a monster number. And so even if people, they read 40 and like, I'm uneasy with that. If somebody in the financial advisor hall of fame is putting a number out like that, and let's say that his most conservative number was like 10%. He's pretty much saying that everyone in the world should have at least 10%. That's a way bigger number than people saying one or 2%, right? And so I think that's kind of where this is all headed is more and more people that maybe they were like curious, maybe they're even skeptical of Bitcoin five years ago. We know a lot of these people. I've interviewed these people. I, you know, I talked to them privately,

• 13:43Anthony Pompliano?

  etc. They're now all kind of like, yeah, of course our clients have exposure to Bitcoin. It's not 50%, but everyone in our portfolio has got 3% to 5% or something, right? Like that is part of the mass adoption. That is really what's driving a lot of this. And I think that the percentage and how you access the Bitcoin really depends on who are you talking to?

• 14:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, uh, it's interesting because over the last few years, you would think that a lot of people's portfolio, that small percentage they had into Bitcoin actually grew over time.

• 14:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, that also, that also.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  They had 1%, now it's 5, 10%, right? Just given like the natural price movement of Bitcoin.

• 14:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, think about people who in 2022, in November, December timeframe, you could have bought a Bitcoin for like 20K, right? You know, somewhere between 16 to $20,000. Now, really hard to do. There's going to quote, quote, blood in the streets, like all, you know, emotion, sentiment, all that stuff is working against pretty much everyone in the world.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  It's down, asset was down 80%.

• 14:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Doesn't feel good for anybody. You're like watching the news headlines, companies are blown up. I mean, all the things that make it difficult. But we're talking about three years ago. Right? Three years ago, you could have bought the thing for 20K. Now it's back up over $100,000, right? Or it's over $100,000. And so that's not unique to Bitcoin. There's a lot, I mean, think about in the stock market. Stocks were down in April. Three months later, we recently published an interview with Ryan Dietrich, right, on, uh, on From the Desk and, uh, Ryan talked about the stock market is up 25% from the April lows in three months. So everyone's like, oh, Bitcoin this, like, that seems like a lot of volatility to me.

• 15:22Anthony Pompliano?

  In four months, if you go from, you know, or to call it five months, from the peak to the trough, back to all time highs in five months? Come on, stop it. We're going down double digits. We're going back up double digits. You know, down more than 20%, up 25%, whatever. That's crazy.

• 15:42Anthony Pompliano?

  So actually, some of this is a Bitcoin story, but I've said it before. I think I even wrote about the idea of like, we live now in a volatility generation. There's two types of investors. One type tries to avoid volatility, older, less risk appetite, all stuff. What do they want? They want bonds. They want all the, and you see this stuff, right? There's all these like new ETFs that have come out where there's like downside protection. Uh, there's these like income type funds where you can like generate yield on single name stocks or on indexes, et cetera. Um, but then also there's a second group of investors that are like max volatility. Uh, you know, what's the saying like, uh, volatility is vitality, right? It's like, you know, things not alive unless it's running around all over the place. Um, I saw recently,

• 16:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Dave Portnoy bought $10 million of Tesla stock, right? And he was like, you know, I think as we had 10% bounce in two weeks, what like, that's the thought process, right? That is kind of what people are thinking now. And, um, I just think that that volatility, uh, in a world where the dollar is getting hurt, inflation is higher than people expected. Um, and there's a lot of challenges in quote, quote, keeping up volatility actually could be a, a potential solution for a portfolio and things like Bitcoin, stock market, et cetera, are, are kind of bringing that into the portfolio.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  All right. Speaking of volatility, uh, the US dollar has been quite volatile over the last few months. It's had its worst start to the year since Richard Nixon was in office. Um, what's going on? Is this, does anything stop this train?

• 17:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, there's two different things that are happening, right? So there is the like national debt and dollar debasement, which is more of like an aggregate measurement. So, uh, if you go back to 2020 till today, the US dollar's lost like nearly 30% of its purchasing power in five years, right? Um, horrific for anyone who has been saving in dollars. Um, a lot of that because we can't stop printing money. The national debt continues to explode. We're addicted to this system. Interest rates now or our interest payments are now more than national defense. All these things people have heard. We have to continue to print money. I was very optimistic that we're going to be able to balance the budget. Take that idea, throw that one out the window, put back on your, you know, nothing stops this

• 17:53Anthony Pompliano?

  train hat. We can print until the sky, right? Uh, it's going to happen under Republicans. It's going to happen under Democrats. We can yell and scream all we want. We ain't going to change nothing. So either you position yourself to benefit from it, or you're going to get hurt by it. Now that is a dollar debasement story, and that has been very detrimental for people holding dollars. Asset prices, obviously, that are priced in dollars, those have gone up. The dollar strength, or the thing like the dollar index, is a relative comparison to other currencies. So now you're getting into, well, are we getting better or worse than these other currencies at a faster or slower rate? Right? Are we strengthening or are we weakening? The dollar has been getting its butt kicked in terms of it has been weakening against these

• 18:36Anthony Pompliano?

  foreign currencies. And so that's where you see that it's down 10%, right? It's kind of losing strength. Now, one of the things that's very interesting, again, I wrote about this a couple of days ago, is this idea that the US dollar has basically been trading within a, what they call an ascending channel. I don't know anything about technical analysis. I don't pretend to know anything about that, but somebody smarter than me said ascending channel. I said, okay, it's an ascending channel, right? Basically, it goes up, but it's a band. And what you see is that when the dollar hits the upper end of the band, that's usually when it peaks in strength, tends to fall over time to the lower end of the band. Well, right now, worst time in history, worst start to the year, 10% to start

• 19:18Anthony Pompliano?

  of it, whatever. We just hit the lower part of the band. And so what has happened in the past, doesn't mean it's going to happen now, but what has happened in the past is actually now, the dollar historically has kind of U-turned and started to strengthen against the other currencies. And so that's pretty interesting, because when everyone gets Max bearish, like right now in the market, everyone's like, well, of course, the dollar's going to keep getting crushed. It's going to be horrible, all this stuff. Well, on the debt and debasement side, yes, but on a relative basis, maybe not. Maybe actually history would tell us that it now will strengthen, and it will kind of violently turn the other direction. Let's see what happens. But I think that is a big part is understanding that it has been in this six-month, kind of very negative position, worst start to the year.

• 20:03Anthony Pompliano?

  But right when everyone is convinced that the dollar's done, it's over, everything's horrible, maybe actually...

• 20:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Take the other side, right? Well, what if now is the time when it turns around? I'm not saying that's gonna happen. I'm not saying it's not gonna happen. But I am saying that historically, if it was going to reverse course and we were going to enter into a dollar strength, right now, it'd be a pretty damn good time, based on the historical data, for that to happen. And so I just think that you have to always question the like mainstream consensus. And right now, the consensus is the dollar is going to continue in the direction that it is. I wonder if everyone is so convinced of that, maybe actually, we're gonna head the other direction.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, the consensus was also that we had a lot of uncertainty going on too, which doesn't help the dollar strength. One of the things that we just got certainty on was the big, beautiful spending bill that just passed.

• 20:53Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't think that's the name, but yes, it's the big, beautiful.

• 20:55Speaker 03

  It's the nickname.

• 20:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it is the nickname.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  It's the nickname. So what do you think about the bill? Obviously, the big talking point here is that it's gonna add over $3 trillion of debt. What's going on? We just keep spending?

• 21:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, there's, actually, one of my biggest takeaways is not even in the bill. It's the conversation around the bill. So if you listen to the critics, it's gonna add $3 trillion to the debt, it's this, that, bam, bam, boom, bam, bang, boom, whatever. They all got all these complaints. If you go talk to people in the White House, in Washington, DC, who have this kind of economic policy, etc., they're gonna tell you it's gonna add zero spending. It's not like, hey, we're debating, rounding pennies here. One says it's gonna add trillions, the other says it's gonna add zero. Okay? I talked with them. I interviewed Stephen Myron. I talked with a couple of other Ross, Russ Vogt, a couple of these guys, right?

• 21:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And my takeaway is that they actually believe the CBO, Congressional Budget Office, whatever it is, the metrics are flawed. So.

• 22:05Anthony Pompliano?

  What the administration's viewpoint, again, you can decide at home whether you agree with this or not, but what their viewpoint is, is that the CBO is essentially saying, if this passes, there are going to be these tax cuts, these tax cuts then will lead to a higher deficit. I think what the administration's response is, is those tax cuts are already in place, for the most part. We are just extending the Trump 2016, 2017 tax cuts, and therefore, actually, it's not a change, it's just a continuation. If we don't extend them, then actually it will be this massive tax hike for people who now are enjoying the tax cut. So that, to me, is actually one of the most interesting parts, is immediately

• 22:46Anthony Pompliano?

  you cannot believe the public discourse around the bill, because you essentially have two groups of very smart people, who are so polar opposite on their conclusion as to what the bill's impact is, that you immediately have to question everything. What it forces you to do, is either just wave your white flag, say, "I don't got the intellectual horsepower, nor interest in this, I'm gonna walk away, and I just don't give a whatever, I'm gonna go focus my portfolio." Or, you can go and try to understand it. And my conclusion, and I'm not an expert on this stuff, but I spent enough time trying to understand it and learn about it, talking to people, is that both sides are right. And everyone hates that

• 23:27Anthony Pompliano?

  answer. But that's actually true. A lot of the bill is extending existing tax cuts, that are not gonna add to the national debt. Then there are things like, no tax on tips, no tax on social security, things like that, that were going to drive government revenue, that now are going to get passed. Now, there's offsets in the bill, and so you kind of get into this whole thing of like, there is this like murky middle, where actually the truth lies, which is, there is probably more spending than I would want to see, and maybe even actually the current administration would want to see. But at the same time, there is not the like

• 24:07Anthony Pompliano?

  craziness that everyone else is yelling and screaming about. So, it is a spending bill. There is increases in spending.

• 24:17Anthony Pompliano?

  But I think that the policy change now went from we're going to balance the budget to you saw this pivot, which is now we are going to grow our way out of the problem. Well, how do you grow your way out of the problem? You stimulate the economy. How do you stimulate the economy? You only got two tools. You pull the monetary policy tool of let's lower interest rates or get that money printed or

• 24:37Anthony Pompliano?

  start putting money in the economy in all kinds of ways, right? And so that's what we're seeing. And again, it's we're addicted to it. And so the like conversation around this bill has reminded me that everyone's crazy. They're all crazy, right? On every which side of this thing and they're all have some agenda. And if you are trying to be unemotional about it, if you are trying to say, I don't care about political affiliations. I don't care about it. I just want to try to find what is actually true and what is going to happen. It is becoming increasingly harder because pretty much anything you read online has some degree of bias. That makes it very difficult. And unless you're willing to sit and read, I don't know how long this bill is, but thousands of pages, right? Unless you're going to go sit and read the whole thing, good luck.

• 25:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I don't think that many politicians signing it read it. I don't, I think, single digits read it. I don't, I would bet you that there's not a single politician who voted for this thing that read it front to back. Right? Now, the same thing happens where there's a lot of documents that people use in their personal life. And, you know, one of the things I always joke with people is like, uh, how many people in America have a mortgage? How many people who took out the mortgage actually read every single paper?

• 25:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Stop. There's no way, right? And so, uh, it's not a thing where like the politicians don't want to know everything. It's just you have a document that's thousands of pages, right? And it's constantly being reiterated and all this. I think one of the bills a couple of months ago was like 25,000 pages. We're not even talking about like, okay, I'll dedicate two days on the weekend to read this, right? We're talking about like, it's humanly impossible to read the bill from the time that is presented to the time that you vote on it, right? And so there's staffers and there's all this stuff. And what I think ends up happening, unfortunately, is just politicians end up deciding, you know what? I'm going to care about three things. These are my three, you know, issues that I care about in this bill.

• 26:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I want to see these three things done. Other places, you know what? I can't fight every battle. Doesn't make it right, doesn't mean it's good for the country, but I do think that there is some element of like, there's like the academic component of every politician should read every bill. With the reality of like, they just can't. And so the real solution, which again, people don't like, is just like, make them shorter. What if all of a sudden, no bill could be more than a hundred pages?

• 27:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Every bill that wants to be passed, you can't be longer than a hundred pages. Simplicity is king. Well, you could pretty much sit down and someone could read it in three hours. Right? So that means that they can put their kid down to sleep and read it before they go to bed. That means they wake up early in the morning, they can read it, right? That means that, you know, over a long lunch, they could read it. Yeah, there's a lot of nuances in these things, which is why they're. Of course, they still need their staffers, they still need whatever, but like, if it's a hundred pages or less, it's readable. And now all of a sudden, what you do is you start to strip out all the nonsense language. Right? And you just get to the matter of fact, which is, what is in the bill? And to me, that is,

• 27:44Anthony Pompliano?

  you know, it's difficult. I don't think we're gonna get a hundred page bills. But, but that is probably one of the big difficulties. Now, what I think is gonna happen, asset price is gonna go to the moon. Like, I mean, it's just, like, if we're gonna spend, if we're gonna drop interest rates, we're gonna do all this stuff. Dollar strength, the, the, like, everything is going up into the right, because, uh, everything is denominated in dollars. And they're gonna let it fly. And they're telling you they're gonna let it fly. The number one thing in this administration that I think people have not got comfortable with, because there's a political, like, um, uh, what do you call it? Like, um, controversy, right? People like, they either like the guy, or they don't like the guy, they like the administration, they don't like the administration. The people who don't like them, don't believe them.

• 28:28Anthony Pompliano?

  So if you look, now, they change what they say, but more so than most administrations, they're pretty open. They hold press conferences, they're constantly answering questions, like all this stuff, right? Much more transparent. Transparency is always this like weird thing, just because you answer questions, doesn't mean you're being transparent, but like, the access is there, right? And I do think that they answer a lot of questions. Uh, people may not like the answers, people may not like the questions, whatever, but like, it is more, uh, kind of what the American people need than anything.

• 29:02Anthony Pompliano?

  For the most part, what I have seen, they do what they're gonna say. Now, you may not like what they say. You may not think that what they're saying is the right thing to do. You may not think that they understand what the implications of what they're doing are. Like, there's a bunch of critiques, but I do think that one of the things that investors who have been kind of disappointed in their investment performance, they are not believing what the administration is saying. So even look at the terrorists. They told you they're gonna put the tariffs on. There's a lot of people, ah, they're not really gonna do it. It's posturing, but they put them on, right? Then they said, we're gonna hike them up. Ah, come on, they're not really gonna hike them up, right? They hiked them up, right? Then they came out and they said, we're gonna drop them. And then people were like, ah, come on, I don't know,

• 29:44Anthony Pompliano?

  like, now we're in chaos land, like this uncertain, then they dropped them. Then they're like, by the way, if you don't go and do what we say, you know, in the deal, we're gonna hike them back. Like, again, it's chaotic because it's, it changes fast, but they actually do end up following through a lot. Now, the, like, you heard the taco trade? Trump always chickens out? Everyone kept saying that, right? And then, I mean, in probably one of the most ridiculous, it's still crazy, how precise this whole Iran bombing thing. From what I understand, they dropped a bomb or a bunker buster into a ventilation tube, and then they dropped a

• 30:29Anthony Pompliano?

  couple more in the same hole, from what I understand? Have you seen the new Top Gun movie?

• 30:33Speaker 03

  That's what I was thinking of.

• 30:35Anthony Pompliano?

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• 32:35Anthony Pompliano?

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• 33:21Anthony Pompliano?

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• 34:06Anthony Pompliano?

  we can drop a buster, a bunker buster bomb into the hole that... By the way, if it was a jailbreak, people would have a hard time getting out of the hole. Right? I mean, think about ventilation. Like, there are movies where people get stuck in the ventilation. And so, we were somehow able to drop a bomb in there. It's crazy to me that Hollywood had the blueprint before we ever used it. So, somebody leaking somewhere. But it goes back to, again, it's like, they kept saying, "You can't have this, you can't have this, you can't..." And they did it. Now, again, are there times where they don't follow through? Of course, right?

• 34:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Big controversy right now. The videotape of the whole Epstein thing. Supposedly, from what I've seen, I have not watched all 12 hours or whatever was released, right? Supposedly, there's one minute missing. I don't know. They say they had the list. Now, there's no list, right? So, I'm not here to comment on anything other than economics.

• 35:05Anthony Pompliano?

  But when it comes to economics, I think that most people have basically said, I don't believe them. And actually, the people who have said, I just believe they're going to do what they say regardless of whether I think it's the right thing or not. Those people have done much better than the people who have not. And it's not a political thing. Like, I think people at this point pretty much know, right? I don't care what political aisle you're on. I don't care. All I care about is what are the policies when it comes to economics? And from an economic standpoint, what are the things that you're doing to actually help people? Right now, here's a mind bender. Jerome Powell is part of the Trump administration. Now, he's supposed to be independent. He says that whatever. Donald Trump is the president. Jerome Powell is part of it. Jerome Powell has interest

• 35:50Anthony Pompliano?

  rates held, I believe artificially high. He's punishing the American public by doing that. They don't have access to cheaper capital. Mortgage rates are higher. Homes are more unaffordable. You know, all these issues. Whether the president and the administration agree or not, it is part of their administration. So now you get a thing where you actually have folks who are doing things that even the administration, obviously publicly are saying they don't agree with, but it still falls under that, right? And so it's like this weird dynamic of when you put the political overlay, everyone wants to point fingers about this politician, whatever. At the end of the day, we're addicted to cheap money. We got to print money. So guess what they're gonna do? They're gonna print money and interest rates are gonna go down over time. When they do that, guess what's gonna happen? Asset

• 36:35Anthony Pompliano?

  prices are gonna go up. You can sit around and you can pontificate with your friends while you drink a beer and smoke a cigar as to who politician, this, that, whatever, or you can go make money. And what I think is now happening is, uh, there was like a whole Twitter generation who didn't care about politics. Politicians and regulators like tapped on their door. And all these people are like, I gotta pay attention to this now, right? And some group of them, they're addicted. They're like, I'm deep down the politician rabbit hole. I this guy, this guy's like a soap opera, right? I gotta focus on all this stuff, whatever. Another group of people say,

• 37:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Just let me operate my business, right? Whether they're in crypto or AI or psychedelics. We go through all these like emerging things all the way to even space, right? I mean, I'm an investor in a company called Varda. It's a private company. They basically put a manufacturing, like physical hardware into space. They manufacture pharmaceutical drugs and they bring it back down. At one point, I think definitely the last two years, they had one of their first devices was stuck in space. They couldn't bring it back because the regulators wouldn't let them. So guess what they did? They said, okay, well, we're going to have to work through this process. But then they also went, and I think it's Australia, gave them the thumbs up. Hey, you can come launch here. We'll bring stuff back. We're commercial.

• 37:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Now all of a sudden, my understanding is that they got a lot more, you know, kind of collaboration with the US government. It's competition entered, right? So it's not just a Bitcoin thing. It's not just whatever. But I do think that we are bifurcating where like if you get addicted to the soap opera of politics, you will have a very hard time looking soberly at the market. But the people who are able to understand what's happening, but frankly, not care and just say, what are they saying they're going to do? Do I believe they're going to do it or not? If I think they're going to do it, what are the implications? Whether I think it's a good idea or not? That is a much different analysis than saying, I don't like them. I like them. This is good. This is bad. I would do this other thing.

• 38:39Anthony Pompliano?

  You're not the president. You're not the commerce secretary. You're not the treasury secretary. You're not the head of the Federal Reserve, right? You're the investor. So do investor things, which means allocate your capital based on what's happening in the world, not what you want to happen in the world. And I think that there's just a lot of people who kind of forgot that. And so I can speak for me personally. I look at the world. The number one thing that they are going to do is they are going to debase the US dollar. And they debase the US dollar. Asset prices are going up into the right. And I think that Bitcoin will be one of many assets that do very well. I think that Bitcoin probably will do much better than many other assets. And so I've been focused on it for a long time. I'm going to stay focused on it for a long time.

• 39:20Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that it's pretty much the, you know, conviction test of our generation is if you have an asset, which mathematically has now been proven to be the, I believe the words that Lyn Alden and Sam Callahan use are the barometer for global liquidity. If you think global liquidity is going up, guess what else is going up?

• 39:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Not that hard. And so I just think that it's why I've come to the conclusion that Bitcoin is the new hurdle rate. If you can't beat it, you gotta buy it. And there's a lot of people who they can't beat it, but they ain't buying it.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  I know the first time you heard Varda and you were like, wait, you are manufacturing drugs in space? Like, you probably did some due diligence, but that was probably a vibe investment.

• 39:58Anthony Pompliano?

  At first, no, at first, they weren't doing drugs at first. They were trying to figure out what they were going to manufacture. There's a lot of different things that they were thinking about. But no, it's interesting because, you know, that investment in particular had two intersecting things. Delian, who's at Founders Fund, is a friend of mine. He's just the type of person, like, I don't care if he told me he's going to create lemonade stands, I'm in, right? Because guess what? He gonna take over the lemonade game in New York City within weeks, right? He'll figure it out. Like, I don't know, it's just like, the guy's gonna figure it out. So when he said he was starting a company, I actually don't remember if I asked him what it was or not. I'm pretty sure that either he told me like the one liner, or he was like,

• 40:42Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm sort of kind of like, I'm in. Okay, what are you doing? Right? But like, it did not take a lot of convincing. I didn't need to like, see the financial projections of his company or anything. She's like, I just want, like, one, he's my friend, but two is, he's the type of person that you wanted to give money to, and he'll figure it out, right? The second thing is, he's like, yo, we're going to space. That's cool. And what I've learned in life is, when you have somebody who can figure it out, and they're doing cool things, invest. Put the money in. Now, people will hear that and be like, I'm doing this cool thing. I'm doing, like, it's probably not that cool, right?

• 41:18Speaker 03

  Twitter DMs are open, by the way.

• 41:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. But like, their whole thesis was, why don't we go to space? But rather than go to space to get to Mars, or go anywhere else, which by the way, is a very admirable and commendable thing to do, why don't we use space to benefit us here on Earth? Kind of different way to think about it, right? Now, that's actually been the winning theme so far, right? If you think about Varda, if you think about Starlink, if you think about a lot of this stuff, right? GPS, all this stuff is, we're using space around Earth to benefit us here on Earth.

• 41:52Anthony Pompliano?

  That has been the the theme. And so I think there's a lot of companies like that that are out there. It's just back the right person doing cool things. And like, what better job to have than make money backing your friends doing cool things? Like, that's like a dream job for most people.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  That is. Let's talk about something. Let's round up here with something that I think encompasses everything we've talked about today, which is Bitcoin, which is space, which is politics, which is Elon. Elon's creating a new political party. A lot of people have tried this. He's probably one of the guys that has the financial means to make a significant push. But one of the things that was interesting was someone tweeted at him and said, will the American party embrace Bitcoin? Elon's response Fiat is hopeless. So yes. What do you what's your takeaway from this?

• 42:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, I don't know who's running the Twitter account of the America party. So maybe it's Elon, maybe it's somebody else. But are they wrong? It kind of goes back like, again, I don't subscribe to Republican Democrat America party or anything else. I'm an American. But the party affiliations, I don't care about those. Right? Everyone could choose their own thing. But who doesn't believe that? Right? Like, if you think that fiat currencies are the path to financial security, then put 100% of your money in in it, or put majority of your money. Every rich person I know, they have majority of their money

• 43:23Anthony Pompliano?

  not in it. Right? And they're using the debasement to their advantage. And so I think that it is, it's not even like controversial. It's like a duh. It's like saying like, the sky is blue. Right? Like, yeah, of course, the sky is blue. Of course Fiat is hopeless in terms of its ability to store wealth over a long period of time. Remember, the US dollar has lost about 30% of its purchasing power in five years. It's crazy. Crazy. Right? That's not like, oh, I talked to my grandpa and he told me, you know, a Coca-Cola used to be five cents and now it's $1.20. Right? Because you're like, yeah, grandpa, we got it. Right? That's not like, oh, back in my day, I got to buy a house for $25,000. Now

• 44:03Anthony Pompliano?

  it's worth a million. Right? Yeah, grandpa, we got it. That's like, yo, five years ago, I personally.

• 44:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Had way more purchasing power than I have now.

• 44:17Speaker 03

  Or I went to buy a home and it was $250,000. Now it's $500,000.

• 44:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And now grandpa is telling people like a little squirt. Now you see what I've been saying, right? So I think that is a kind of a no brainer. On the political party stuff, um, I, I, I do think that, um, having multiple political parties is better than having one. Duh, right? Having three is better than two.

• 44:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Having five is probably better than two.

• 44:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know if it's actually helpful to have like 20. So there's some magic number between probably like two and I don't know, eight or something. Where you have enough competition, but you don't have such fracturing that like, there's just constant fighting all the time. Right?

• 45:02Anthony Pompliano?

  And so having a third one is probably a good idea. It doesn't mean that this one is the right one. Doesn't mean this one's going to be successful. It's very hard. A lot of people have lost a lot of money doing it.

• 45:15Anthony Pompliano?

  But if there's one person who could do it, it's the guy who's averaged a multi-billion dollar company every five years for now 35 years. Like the guy, just don't bet against them. That's why I was so bullish about the Doge thing. And so I think that they ran into a lot of brick walls that were insurmountable.

• 45:42Anthony Pompliano?

  You know, what is it like, uh, the people who are the best at something? The odds that they lose one match, you know, like I was saying, sports is usually pretty low. The odds they'd lose two matches in a row is like near zero, right?

• 45:57Anthony Pompliano?

  I wouldn't bet against them, but I think it's very hard. And I do think that, um, he may become frustrated and realize the political stuff is less of where he can have impact.

• 46:11Anthony Pompliano?

  The better thing, obviously, is, uh, you know, building the companies. And again, like, look, he gets a lot of critiques. I think he's the first one. He said it publicly, right? You know, my favorite Elon quote of all time. You see all these like motivational quotes. You see all these like Instagram things, YouTube videos, people tweeting all this. My favorite line Elon's ever said is the opening of SNL when he hosted it. And he says, uh, I'm trying to go to Mars. Did you think I'd be normal? Right? Like, or whatever, like, whatever the paraphrase. And it's like, yeah, like, he is self-aware, right? Doesn't mean he's normal, doesn't mean that he's gonna change, whatever. But like, he is self-aware.

• 46:54Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I just think that, um, these political party stuff is, uh, um, much harder. But having a political party also requires you to have candidates that can win. And what I, again, very cursory, uh, reading is he is trying to pick a couple of House and Senate races, a very small number where he can go and basically win and have his candidate be successful. And if he does that, then he's basically able to insert himself into these very contentious votes, where now all of a sudden, those candidates that they've been able to flip, uh, are like the deciding votes. So, again, makes sense. Just very difficult to do. Yeah, all right. Thank you. All right. Thank you guys so much. We'll see you guys next week.